Put your leftover paint to good use

Rachael Mard

Tuesday

Jun 26, 2007 at 12:01 AMJun 26, 2007 at 8:37 AM

Tips on using leftover paint.

Raise your hand if you have at least five paint cans with half or less left in them. Yeah, me, too. The other day I came across 10 of them. I tend to repaint rooms in my house often, occasionally to the distress of my husband. Actually, he’s fairly tolerant of my out-of-the box decorating style and various other home-improvement projects and ideas. He is used to rooms randomly being rearranged or repainted.

Using those leftover cans of paint, try adding some stripes on the wall or walls of another room. You could also paint a piece of furniture, three to five picture frames or the trim around your windows and baseboard. Try painting just a small wall, shelf or other little nook that our quaint, New England homes are famous for. You’ll only need a little bit of paint and, more importantly, a little bit of time for this project.

Adding stripes to your walls also helps create the feeling of length or width to the room, depending on their direction. For a horizontal stripe, measure either more or less than halfway up your wall, this will be the height of the bottom of your stripe. Mark that measurement around the room every 18 inches or so, use a straight edge to connect the marks in pencil. You can either mask off the line with tape or freehand it with a brush, both methods have their pros and cons, find what works for you. I suggest making the horizontal stripe between 6 and 8 inches thick. If you want to add vertical stripes, start off by doing just one wall, creating a focal point in the room. Measure the wall and decide how many lines and the thickness that will be used. You can use pretty much any thickness when doing vertical stripes, they are a little more versatile. Odd numbers also tend to be more visually pleasing, if you want an even number of stripes though, go for it, it's your home.

How about using more than one color at a time? Recently I stumbled across some leftover paint from my living room and bedroom. I was bored and snowed in since it was winter and my son was napping. I decided to repaint my downstairs bathroom with the two colors. I used the living room color, kind of an earthy light green, on the top half of the walls and the light purple from my bedroom on the bottom. A friend gave me some leftover wallpaper border with a botanical print containing both of the colors on it. I slapped that up to cover the seam where the two paint colors met. Presto! New bathroom in three hours.

If you have leftover paint, then you have leftover brushes and rollers, right? If not, it’s a quick trip to the dollar store for a fast and inexpensive purchase. A few paintbrushes and roller covers and you're good to go. I like to buy the painting supplies that I use for quick, small projects at the dollar store, because I don’t worry about throwing them away after I’m done.

By using paint colors that are dominant in one room as an accent in another room or rooms, your entire living space becomes visually tied together. This will help make your home feel more unified and put together, even when there are toys strewn from one end to the other.

Rachael Mard, a mother of two and full-time bartender, does home improvement and home decoration jobs in her spare time. She will offer tricks, tips and ideas every two weeks in The Purple Tool Belt. Have a comment or question? Reach her by e-mailing Custom Publications editor Tim Malcolm at tmalcolm@norwichbulletin.com.

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